Chapter 22 Claret
Fragments of human skull fall through my fingers as I sway on my feet.
I do not scream. I gasp, perhaps; I would dare anyone not to, when so intimately acquainted with what used to be another person’s head, another person’s empty eye sockets.
I want to wipe this hideous dust off my hand, but there’s no time to move.
Because my gasp, combined with the hollow sound the bone made as it crumbled, was enough to alert Shepherd.
She turns around and reaches for me, lightning fast, a predator that doesn’t miss.
What happens next makes little sense. The walls tilt. I fall. I’m being dragged across the hallway by my foot, a leopard’s tail wrapped around my ankle. When did Shepherd slip back into her feline form? And why am I again as powerless as a torn tree branch carried by the wind?
Fear floats thick around me, a frigid cloud that clogs my skin and turns my limbs to stone.
From this angle, I see more of my horrible surroundings: skulls are stacked up from floor to ceiling in a baffling feat of architecture, macabre building stones for Shepherd’s halls.
Countless empty eye sockets looking down on me, urging me to witness them.
Gods help me, I do. Some of the skulls are pristine, bone yellow; others are marred by viscous rivulets of black, as if in death they’re weeping charcoal tears.
I am aware of all this, but not in charge of my own body and its movements.
Why can’t I grab my knife, sever that shackle made of fur, break free?
Leopard-again Shepherd growls as if she’s heard my thoughts.
I want to ask what’s happening, where she is taking me.
If I committed some variety of sacrilege breaking that skull, and I am now being taken to where my punishment awaits.
But though I urge the words to leave my lips, repeatedly, nothing comes out.
She didn’t order me to ‘stay still’ this time, yet the result is very much the same: I’m being moved against my will, a lifeless ribbon on the floor, in a paralysis of cartilage and courage.
My cloak has pooled under my head, its crimson colour like the promise of spilled blood.
I think of Agamemnon, then, and how his own blood pooled under his head, his own skull crumbled by my actions.
I don’t find joy in this red-tinted recollection; the hunger to hurt him feels further away, a whisper of a tale that took place before my time.
But I do not find sorrow in it either. If this is after all the Underworld, and I am being dragged by Shepherd to atone for crimes perceived and real alike, no remorse lightens the dark waters of my heart.
If she’s to strip my spirit from my flesh, separate muscle from the bone until I look no different from this assorted litany of death around me, she’ll find no penance there.
Only refusal to repent, righteous indignation, and thoughts of raven hair dancing in rainy skies.
Anassa. I hold that thought as tight around me as I can, while Shepherd drags me to my final fate.
Above me, all the skulls are watching, silent and unyielding, their yellowed teeth uttering no more words than I am.
If they proclaim me guilty, they keep that judgement to themselves.
Perhaps they’ll weep black tears for me.
I close my eyes – to stop seeing those sorrowful skulls, avoid what’s coming, or simply relish the movement of the only body part I still seem able to control. No one can witness their own annihilation without blinking. Not even me.
My eyelids flutter every time Shepherd takes a sudden turn, my body hitting walls at an angle. Yet I’m so drained, the thought of opening my eyes again feels laborious.
A death-like slumber falls on me, and I don’t fight that either.
When life sings back into my veins, a million needles pinching me awake, Shepherd is gone and I’m no longer on the floor.
I’m left alone in an enormous room, facing an arched opening.
Alone, but not free to flee – I’m shackled to an ornate wooden chair, gold armbands digging into my wrists.
My feet have been submerged in scented, lukewarm water.
I can move my toes, enough to make the waters slosh within the copper basin, but I refrain from making any sudden movements.
Shepherd might still be lurking somewhere, just outside the room.
This is a different place, again; not a hallway, more akin to the private halls back in my palace.
The vaulted ceilings, the careful masonry, the wooden columns rising high, wafting with smoke – even the carvings on the golden bands keeping me prisoner, eagles and snakes and lions – none of these things would look unseemly in Mycenae.
For a split second, I wonder whether Shepherd’s punishment was simply to return me to my world and, in my absence, the court has turned its tide against me.
It would explain the water basin; no queen would walk to her demise unpurified, especially if the gods are watching, eager to be appeased.
Especially if I’m being sacrificed.
I feel it, then. The slow dripping of something warm and sticky from my head, as if my hair has been anointed with oil.
Droplets of russet-coloured liquid dot my shoulders, slithering down my naked arms, like those red ribbon snakes haunting the fields outside of Shepherd’s arch.
I’m wearing the same dress I left my world in, the one I used to lure my husband to his death, the one that’s been through so much blood and salt and stains throughout my journeys in this realm.
Only my dress is now pristine white, shiny and unblemished.
And my cloak is nowhere to be seen.
No. They can take my life, but they can’t take away what happened. The things I’ve done; the things I’ve witnessed and experienced. The stains from crawling through that bloody cave, the sweetness of that meadow rain, the part of my dress I tore up to clean Anassa’s face.
I will hold on to those until I can no longer hold on to my breath.
I won’t make my slaughter easier for them. Even if I don’t have my knife, I can still fight.
I try my wrists first, squirming to coax the bands to give, but they hold tighter than Agamemnon’s angry hands when he wanted to confine me, to keep me in my place in more ways than one.
I let the bands be, for now – even the stubbornest of metals can surrender given time and patience, this I’ve learned.
I have more luck from the waist down: slowly, making as little noise as possible, I remove my feet from the basin and shove it aside.
The ground is strangely warm and somewhat softer than it should be, like caked sand after a long day under the sun’s ruthless rays.
Still, I plant my feet and push upward, locking my knees.
The chair is heavy, threatening to tumble me, but I manage to stand up.
If I move fast enough, before any guards arrive, maybe I can bang the chair against the wall. Break its arms, free myself that way.
Maybe even use the splintered wood to take out someone’s eye.
But I only manage a few steps before my death approaches, darkening the door.
A wraith, a thing of shadow like the ones I’ve fought and run from – only different.
This one doesn’t reek of roses, it doesn’t have the form of a snake-headed Erinya.
Yet I would take both those others in a heartbeat.
Because this wraith wears a gold mask, stretched out like the funerary masks my goldsmiths made in Mycenae, its ears both facing me like its eyes do, its lids both closed and open, its pointed beard as sharp as any sword.
Even in this grotesque, gilded depiction, there’s no mistaking the resemblance. My husband’s face stares back at me.
Conflicting instincts rage within me: the need to flinch, to cower, to stand my ground, to attack, to open my mouth wide and tear this shadow with my teeth, if I have to. He doesn’t scream, the golden Agamemnon of this world, only wheezes – a dreadful, accusatory sound.
‘I would stay very calm if I were you,’ a voice says. Not his. But not Shepherd’s either.
The wraith that wears my husband’s face takes a step back, revealing yet more horror at the doorway.
A skeleton, spondyls pristine and swanlike connecting what must once have been a long neck to a clavicle, a sternum, a spine, a pelvis locked between two long femurs, papyrus-coloured cartilage keeping the knees bent, the toes moving. Approaching me.
I can’t retreat – not without falling into Agamemnon’s arms.
Erect and animate, the skeleton walks towards me, holding a bowl of blood in bony hands.